Lucky Horseshoes
by Mark of the Asphodel
Summary: Saving the world isn't all flash and glamor.  A series of sketches about everyday life during the War of Heroes.  Spoilers for FE3 and FE12.  Rated for war-type stuff.  Dedicated to Manna, for our many discussions on realism vs. fantasy.
1. Chapter 1

**Lucky Horseshoes**

_Some less-renowned moments in the War of Heroes_

I do not own _Fire Emblem_ or any of its characters.

Warning: Takes place during _Shin Monshou no Nazo_. Not _Monshou_ (FE3), and not _Shadow Dragon_ (FE11). May therefore contain what **appear** to be continuity errors. Before you get out the torches and pitchforks, be warned that _Shin Monshou_ gets pretty darned weird. Then again, maybe I changed something on purpose. Also, spoilers for FE12, which of course has not even been translated yet...

* * *

_Chapter One: In which Norne scams the commissary_

"Eat up, Ryan. You'll need your energy on the march tomorrow."

"I don't want any," the little archer said, and his big green eyes looked larger and sadder than usual.

"Don't be silly. You can't keep pace with just a scoop of turnips in your stomach." Now, that wasn't entirely true, as Ryan or anyone else _could_ march on nothing more than a handful of bitter acorns if his life truly depended on it, but it wasn't the best way to go about things. "Now, finish your meat."

When Norne first joined the Altean army, she'd been thrilled by the daily allowance of meat, as up to then she'd rarely had a taste of bacon or roasted chicken. She quickly realized that the soldiers were given meat not to be _nice_, but because the fat in it helped to keep them all alive and reasonably healthy, the same way they got rations of coffee to keep them awake. And Norne rather liked staying alive, so she dutifully worked her way through every scrap of meat, even when it was dry and stringy and so salted you could soak it in seawater and it'd come out _less_ salty. But Ryan just clamped his lips shut and shook his head, and Norne wondered yet again how the boy was going to make it through to the end of this war.

Ryan excused himself, no doubt to head off any more attempts to get him to finish his supper. Norne watched him scamper off in the direction of the clearing they'd set up as a makeshift practice yard that afternoon. She spoke across the fire to Ryan's brother.

"I know he's not any older than we were when we got caught up in the unpleasantness a few years back, but..."

Gordin just shook his head at the younger boy's delicate nerves.

"Last time we finished off the pickled beef, Ryan looked in the barrel and saw horseshoes down at the bottom."

"Oh." Well, that was a sorry fact of army life. Sometimes peddlers sold them a barrel of mule meat and called it beef, or gave them a potted horse and claimed it was pork. Once in the war against Dolhr they'd had a haunch of pegasus for supper, which made half the men sick and brought most of the women to tears. But it was that or starve, so they picked its dainty bones clean, then roasted the bones and cracked them for the marrow. Again, when your main goal was staying alive...

"It takes a while..." Gordin's voice trailed off; he was still a shy thing, for all that he'd turned into a little heartbreaker since Norne had seen him last. Whenever he shook his head, as he did again right then, his hair swished around his ears in a way that was just plain cute. Gordin didn't seem to notice the effect he made, though; he sat there, still and quiet, and Norne just studied him for a while. When she couldn't take the silence anymore, she wiped her hands on the grass and got to her feet.

"That reminds me, I need to drop by the commissary and get myself set up proper for tomorrow." Things were a little funny in the Altean army these days, and no one had bothered to issue Norne a mess kit or much else when she joined them at Olbern castle. If she hadn't been a veteran, she'd have been pretty well lost in the shuffle.

"See you at midnight, then."

And so they parted ways, at least until the hour when Norne would relieve Gordin of watch duty later in the night. Norne made her way to the supply train, waving to more than a few familiar faces as went. New faces too, of course, but it was reassuring to know the world wasn't completely upside-down. In fact, she was slipping right back into the mindset of army life like a salmon set loose in its favorite stream. Memories of the last war felt more real now than did memories of the cobblestone streets and peaked rooftops of her village. Even her bones and muscles had their own kind of memory- her feet marched along in perfectly measured steps.

"Your name, miss?" Jeffers the clerk was a fat little man who looked like he spent most of his time eating his own stock.

"Captain Norne of the First Altean Volunteers." It was a joke title she'd carried through the last war, and while she'd truly had a little band of volunteers under her by the time they reached Dolhr Keep, being Captain of Volunteers meant a whole lot of nothing once the war was over. Well, that wasn't fair- it meant a pension, at least, and back home they gave her a parade through the main street of the village. And it wasn't like she really wanted to stay in the army and train to be a knight or anything. But now there was a war on again, and being Captain Norne meant she got better rations than plain little Norne the Archer would merit, so she would be the leader of the nonexistent Altean Volunteers until somebody asked her to stop.

"Ah, yes. My apologies, Captain. You've changed your hair... I didn't recognize you." He well ought to have known her, as she'd recruited him in the scrubland of Raman back in the day- not far north of where they were that very evening. And Norne was quite sure that her hair was every bit as limp and carrot-colored as it'd been in those days. But she patiently listened to Jeffers babble on as he assembled her a proper little messkit for her- a tin plate and cup, a chunk of salt pork and a pound of hard biscuits, a little each of coffee and sugar, and a tiny bit of salt. Three days' rations, under normal conditions. And, as befitted an officer, Captain Norne got a little flask of whiskey in the bargain.

"And don't forget the molasses." Norne watched over the clerk's shoulder to make sure the stick of boiled molasses went into her kit.

"Here, ma'am."

"Thanks, Jeffers."

Norne requisitioned a new pack while she was at it, as the straps were starting to come off the old one she'd toted about through the Dolhr war. She tucked her supplies in the pack, tested it to make sure it sat on her shoulders well and that the straps wouldn't tear clean off under pressure, then said her goodnight to Jeffers and set herself on a course for the practice yard.

She found Ryan doing what all distraught young archers did when they didn't want to talk about it. Judging from the number of bent arrows, Ryan wasn't the kind whose aim got better when he was stirred up. On the one hand, Norne felt sorry for him... but on the other, wars didn't spare little boys on account of their sensitive spirits.

"It's close to curfew, soldier. You'd better head on back to the tents."

He jumped about a foot into the air at the sound of her voice.

"Easy, Ryan," she said then. "It's just me, checkin' up on you. Can't let someone go off alone, and you know it."

He just watched her from under his fringe of hair. Poor boy... he'd likely thought it a grand adventure, going off to be a real bow-knight with his big brother and the entire Seventh Platoon, and then the whole world went mad at once. And here they all were, hundreds of miles from home, on the wrong side of the Straits of Chiasmir and everything else.

"Catch!" She chucked the stick of molasses at him and was pleased to see Ryan's reflexes were quick enough to snag it out of the air. "All yours."

"Truly?"

"Sure. I have another for myself." White lies came so easily once you got started.

"Thanks." And Ryan set to work chewing it up with an enthusiasm that said the poor child really was hungry.

"You know what's really great? You poke the end of it in a orange and suck out the juice, right through the molasses." Norne could almost taste the sticky sour-sweet of it on her tongue.

Ryan's eyes brightened for a moment, but then he looked at his boots again.

"We don't have any oranges."

"Not a one. And we won't have, until we get back in Altea. So what you need to do is march hard, and fight hard, and we'll get there all the quicker. And if you don't eat and sleep when you get the chance, you might not get there at all."

For a few more moments, all Norne could hear was the noise of candy being devoured. Then Ryan spoke in the softest little voice imaginable.

"Are we really going home, Norne? Won't the imperial army fight us to the death now that we're traitors?"

"Well, maybe. But we don't know what all the emperor believes, and which parts of this whole 'traitor' mess are comin' from the emperor's men and not from His Majesty." But, young as he was, Ryan was well past the age when a vague reassurance would settle his fears, so Norne had to make a better argument than _that_. "All I do know is that I've fought alongside Emperor Hardin, and I can tell you straight, the same as your brother- he's a good man. I can't fathom what Lang and these other generals have been doin' out in the frontier, and I don't know what sort of lies are bein' spread about our prince, but I can guarantee that if Prince Marth can speak with the emperor face to face, we can get all of this settled and all get home."

Ryan smiled then, and Norne had to hold herself back from scrubbing a spot of molasses off his cheek.

"General Lang was a terrible man," he said, and the smile drained away.

"Aye. He deserved to die." That was another lesson the little archer beside her had to absorb- that showing mercy to your enemies sometimes just meant you'd encounter them again, and worse than before. "They say bad apples spoil all the barrel, and he was bad enough to wreck an entire country."

Grust hadn't been any paradise the last time Norne had passed through, but now it was a disaster of scorched fields and razed villages. She could only pray that whoever it was that seized Altea Castle wasn't as wholeheartedly evil as General Lang. Norne had to stop her mind from racing ahead of her heart then- instead of bolstering Ryan's spirits, this conversation was dragging her own hopes down. But the trumpets sounded the curfew, and Captain Norne straightened her shoulders and marched her young comrade off to the tents for a few hours' rest before the next watch.

Tomorrow, after all, would be a whole new bundle of problems.

_To Be Continued..._

_

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_Author's Notes: NOT a sequel of any sorts to my other Norne story, "To Freely Serve." This assumes the "everyone survived" FE12 continuity and "To Freely Serve" follows the brutal FE11 continuity wherein characters have to die for the player to even recruit Norne. Expect more weird discontinuities later as a result...

Yes, and you recruit Norne in Chapter Six of FE12- which would equate to "The Nest of Vice" in FE3. This takes place shortly thereafter, on the journey to Raman.


	2. Chapter 2

**Lucky Horseshoes**

I do not own _Fire Emblem_ or any of its characters.

* * *

_Chapter Two, in which Norne takes the measure of the Altean Army's rising star_

The Liberation Army started their campaign in Raman by liberating a dozen chickens from the coop of a hostile farmer. The hen that Norne grabbed had a clutch of three eggs under her, and after silencing the hen Norne slipped the eggs into her kit pouch. Nothing like a good breakfast to kick off the day.

She shared her find with Gordin and Ryan, of course. One egg apiece was almost enough to go around; she would've liked to keep the hen, too, but she'd had to give that one over to her seniors so that the little prince and princess of Grust had a proper breakfast. Besides, Gordin was the best of them at cooking eggs; he had a neat hand in turning them.

"It'd be nice to have some buttered toast with this," Norne said to herself as she dunked her hard biscuit in coffee. It was the only way to soften the biscuits to the point where you could chew them. But fondly imagining some toast wasn't going to get her any, just as imagining the taste of roasted chicken wasn't going to get that hen back in her hands.

The three of them ate in near-silence. Something was different about camp these days, Norne thought. Not the same feel as she remembered back in the war against the Dolhr-Grust alliance. Norne wondered at first if it wasn't just the horror that came with knowing there were foreign troops running rampant over your homeland. For certain the early days after the fall of Altea in '02 had been dark ones, filled with stunned silence and outbreaks of rage, but when they finally left Talys and went on the offensive, spirits ran high from the word "go" and only went higher. Yes, some of that spirit was missing from the Liberation Army right then.

But she'd actually _seen_ the Archanean army coming down on them before she and Sir Frey had escaped, and Norne didn't feel she was any different for it. The ones who'd been on the expedition down to Macedon were taking everything especially hard- maybe it was a feeling of guilt that the kingdom had toppled while all of them were busy elsewhere? She guessed that was reason enough for the unease in camp.

The real reason hit Norne as they were cleaning up camp: Prince Marth wasn't coming around to see them and have a chat with them. The only time Norne had really had a chance to talk with the prince was when she located the army in Grust and pledged her services for the duration, but it surprised her that nobody else was seeing much of their prince, either. Back during the _last_ war, he'd always been one to check in on his people, to see that the wounded were faring decently and the ones on their feet were ready for the next dust-up. A quiet morning like this would've seen the prince coming over to their fire to see if his archers needed anything. Not today, though.

Norne wondered if this new distance had anything to do with the _incident_ last year. Knowing that assassins managed to get deep into the Altean army would be reason enough for the prince to keep his distance from his ragamuffin band of knights, healers, and sellswords.

As it was, the first time Norne laid eyes on the prince that day was when they headed out northward into Raman. The prince looked splendid on his dappled mare, all azure and gold, and Norne watched as he leaned over in the saddle to address someone standing next to him. That someone looked sort of familiar.

"Who's that man in the cloak who's always attending Prince Marth? That's not our Lord Merric."

"That's Ras," Gordin said, like Norne ought to know the name.

"Ras?"

"It's short for Rasputin. He's from Sera..." Gordin's eyes looked a little misty for a moment. "Ras was the one who protected Prince Marth during that... during the incident last year."

Norne whistled.

"Well, now, I can see why the prince would want to keep someone like that close."

She kept her eye on Ras for a time after that, though. Or tried to. It seemed the man kept disappearing.

**To Be Continued...**

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**A/N**: This is not the standard mercenary "Chris" as depicted on the box art for FE12, as we shall see...


	3. Chapter 3

**Lucky Horseshoes**

I do not own _Fire Emblem_ or any of its characters.

* * *

_Chapter Three, in which Norne acquires a new pair of boots_

"Now, that's more like it."

Stealing from thieves- especially dead ones- was one of the more dark amusements of army life. Profitable, too, as thieves usually had all manner of useful things on them; if you didn't mind getting your hands a little dirty shaking down a corpse, the findings were usually worth it.

Right now, Norne wanted a new pair of boots and hadn't seen much luck in acquiring any, but this particular ex-thief was a slim youngster just short of manhood, and his feet weren't overly large. His soft leather boots looked like they'd fit well on Norne's own feet. Two good tugs and the prize was hers.

"I'd give you my old ones for a fair exchange," she said, "But I doubt you'd get much use of them."

Besides, it might come to a point where even useless worn-out boots were better than none.

As Norne continued her "cleanup" of her corner of the battlefield, she came to a corpse that wasn't particularly gruesome, but the sight of it dismayed her all the same.

"Now, isn't that a shame."

It was one of the young knights of the Seventh Platoon, the one who wore green armor like he was trying to be another Black Panther. His breastplate and shoulder were all smeared with blood, but he was lying on his back, calm and relaxed like he'd fallen asleep.

"Rody, was it? I heard you were shaping up nicely. Ryan won't be happy to learn about you, either."

Young Ryan had looked up to the others in his platoon, wanting to emulate their bravery, and Rody had made an impression on him. Well, if Ryan hadn't learned the lesson yet that "brave" often equaled "dead," he'd learn it now.

Comrades were comrades, but loot was loot, and Norne went down beside the youngster not to pray, but to see if Sir Rody had anything good or useful on his person when he fell. Cavaliers usually rated something a bit better than archers in terms of kit and supplies. She hadn't gone far in taking off his armor when she realized he wasn't as dead as he'd looked.

"Hey, you're still breathing. Wake up, now."

Rody woke easily enough; he seemed groggy, but despite all the blood it seemed most of the damage had been to his right arm, which dangled limp at his side when Rody sat up.

"I could no longer fight," he explained, "and I was too far off to signal for help, so I thought I'd just find a quiet place to lay down and meet with my fate."

"Well, in that case, I'm it." Young Rody's attitude impressed her, though. It took some nerve to deal with oncoming death without screaming, and Norne had met many a fine-looking man who hadn't been able to manage it. "If that was a fatal wound, you'd have blood gushing out your mouth and nose and everywhere else with every breath, so I think you'll make it until we get back to the healers."

She helped Rody to his feet and they began picking their way toward the victory banners that fluttered off on the horizon.

**To Be Continued...**


End file.
